Sitting next to me at the sushi bar at Ikko was a family of three – a father, a mother and a small child doing her homework with a Hello Kitty pen in a Hello Kitty notebook pulled from a Hello Kitty backpack.

There’s no children’s menu at Ikko. But then, for this child, there was no need. She stopped doing her homework long enough to look at the menu.

Or, I should say, one of the several menus, for Ikko has a new wave menu, a menu of handwritten specials, a menu of printed specials, two sushi menus, and a page of soups and desserts.

Not counting the sushi, there are more than 60 items on the several menus at Ikko – which is a lot of dishes for a restaurant not much bigger than a walk-in closet. A spacious walk-in closet, but a walk-in closet nonetheless.

Anyway, I listened in as the little girl talked to her parents about what to order. Or at least, I tried to, though I didn’t do very well, for they were speaking Japanese.

But as far as I could tell, there was much discussion about miso soup (with baby clams, or with nameko mushrooms) versus clear soup (with sour plum and dried kelp, or daikon radish and dried kelp); the miso soup mushrooms won out in the end.

So did the whiting tempura and the stuffed chicken with teriyaki sauce over brown rice.

“You should try the smoked giant clam,” the father said to me, noticing that I had been puzzling over the menu for a long time. I did. He was right – it was worth trying.

Ikko is a wholly unique restaurant in a wholly ordinary strip mall. At night, most of the mall is dead and dark – the most inviting aspect may be the gas station at the Torrance Boulevard end, which tends to have some of the lowest prices around.

Indeed, if you didn’t know Ikko was there, you might not notice it, for it’s an exercise in understatement, with a modest sign, windows covered with curtains – a look of being closed. Parking in front of it, I wasn’t actually sure it was open until I pushed the door. And what I found inside was definitely a surprise, a bit of cognitive dissonance in mall land.

Walking into Ikko is a bit like entering a cloud – a realm of swirling, diaphanous material that separates the tables one from another, and the sushi bar from the dining room.

It’s quite a bit of design, something of a seraglio done geisha style. It’s all very soft – and a bit isolating if you choose one of the corner tables.

Since I don’t like isolation (I prefer to feel as if I’m in the middle of it all), I opted for the area that gave me the greatest sense of connection, sitting at one of the few seats at the small sushi bar.

This also gave me a fine view of the chefs at work. And even though it was a quiet night, they never stopped moving. Being a sushi chef means endless motion, from the beginning of the day to the end.

Ikko describes its cooking as “sushi and freestyle Japanese cuisine.” It’s the South Bay branch of a restaurant that’s been impressing diners in Costa Mesa for the past four years.

And it is impressive. Indeed, glancing at the menu, it’s sort of dazzling. Which makes the assemblage of a meal a decidedly tricky bit of business.

I mean, there are dishes available at Ikko that I’ve never seen anywhere else. This is alternative Japanese cooking from an alternative universe – and what it’s doing in this funky mini-mall is a mystery to me.

The menu begins with a selection of “Small Appetizers” (a minor redundancy, being appetizers are small by definition), which is where I found the smoked giant clam. It really is a small appetizer – about a tablespoon of food, so intensely flavored that it dazzles even as you desire more. Our old friend giant clam (aka geoduck) has been chopped roughly with bits of wasabi root – real wasabi root, not the powdered stuff found at lesser restaurants everywhere.

It’s an exercise in taste, an exercise in texture, an exercise in small bits of perfection. But then, so is the salad made of three kinds of radish – daikon, kaiware and red – jumbled with a snappy dressing of Japanese yuzu lime and basil.

It’s worth noting that Ikko is rather obsessed with its dressings. Virtually every dish that comes with a dressing, comes with a different dressing. This is highly labor-intensive. But that doesn’t seem to faze the chefs at Ikko.

Thus, the seared tuna salad comes with a sesame-soy dressing, while the albacore salad is coated with yuzu and honey.

And then, there are the various sliced seafoods listed under the heading of “New Wave Sashimi Carpaccio.”

There’s a tamari soy-mustard vinaigrette that coats the tuna with shiitake mushroom chips; shark’s fin-sour plum sauce on the salmon carpaccio; jalapeno-ginger sauce on the yellowtail carpaccio; citrus vinaigrette on the Japanese red snapper carpaccio; a choice of yuzu sauce or red wine-sour plum sauce on the fresh octopus from Hokkaido; and what the menu describes simply as “salsa” on the seared albacore with avocado.

So far, I’ve barely scratched the surface of the menu. As I said, eating here takes some work, simply because there’s so much to choose from – and all of it sounds good, even wondrous.

Of course, you can simplify things by going for one of the sashimi plates, either three fish for $18 or five fish for $28. And they’re good. But compared to a dish such as the mackerel and seaweed with spicy miso sauce, sashimi does pale. After all, it’s just fish.

I never got to the sushi. But I will – this is a restaurant that I want to go back to. I and Hello Kitty like it a lot.

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